Author: Adam Clulow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231164289
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
The Dutch East India Company was a unique, hybrid organization acting as both company and state, aggressively intervening in Asian political matters in which it had no place. This study focuses on the company’s clashes with Tokugawa Japan in the seventeenth century, particularly in the areas of diplomacy, sovereignty, and violence. In each encounter, the Dutch were forced to abandon claims to sovereign powers and refashion themselves—from subjects of a fictive king to loyal vassals of the shogun, from aggressive pirates to meek merchants, and from insistent defenders of colonial rule to legal subjects of the Tokugawa state. The first book to treat the Dutch East India Company as more than a commercial enterprise, this text offers unprecedented perspective on one of the most important, long-lasting unions between an Asian state and a European overseas enterprise and the surprisingly limited influence of Europeans operating in early-modern Asia.
Author: Yasuko Suzuki
Publisher: Apollo Books
ISBN: 9781920901516
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
In the early modern period, relations between the Netherlands and Japan were founded on trade. The Dutch United East India Company operated in Japan for over 100 years, from 1609 to the early 18th century. The Dutch-Japanese relationship - built sometimes on understanding and at other times on resentment - is recorded in great detail in the trade-related archives of the period. This book closely examines these documents to reveal the changing market conditions of the main commodities exported by the Dutch from Japan at the time: silver, koban (gold), copper, and camphor. This analysis of both Dutch and Japanese perspectives on the trade market forms an intricate picture of the cultural, political, and economic context of trade between the Netherlands and Japan in the early modern period. *** "...many useful tables and charts in this book, which economic historians of Japan and Asian trade networks will be able to use in the future." - Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 39:2, 2013
Author: William C. Byham
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN: 9780887306303
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
Examines the impact of Japanese management techniques and methodology on North American businesses.
Author: Timon Screech
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198832036
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 325
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Book Description
The East India Company, founded in London in 1600, was the world's biggest trading organization until the twentieth century. It was originally a spice trading organization, and its existence was precarious in its early years. But its governors soon began to think bigger. A decade after itsfoundation, they started to plan voyages to more fabulous places, notably Japan. Japan had silver, was cold in winter, and had no sheep, so was a perfect market for England's main export, woollen cloth. The Company planned to add to its spice-runs, sailing back and forth to Japan, exchanging woolfor silver. This could be done quickly and easily, over the top of Russia - or so the maps of the day suggested (these same maps also showed Japan twenty times too large, about the size of India).Knowing the Spanish and Portuguese had got there before them, the Company prepared a special present to impress and win over their Japanese hosts. They chose as their first gift a silver telescope. The expedition carrying the telescope departed in 1611, and the Shogun was finally presented with thetelescope in the name of King James I in 1613. It was the first telescope ever to leave Europe, and the first made as a presentation item. Before this voyage had even returned, the Company had dispatched another with an equally stunning cargo: nearly a hundred oil paintings.This is the story of these two extraordinary cargoes: what they meant for the fortunes of the Company, what the choice of them says about the seventeenth century England from which they came, and what effect they had on the quizzical Asian rulers to whom they were given.
Author: Michael Laver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350126055
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.
Author: Ryotaro Shiba
Publisher: Vertical Inc
ISBN: 1568366248
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 247
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Book Description
In Ryotaro Shiba's account of the life of Japan's last shogun, Perry's arrival off the coast of Japan was merely the spark that ignited the cataclysm in store for the Japanese people and their governments. It came to its real climax with the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, the event which forms the centerpiece of this book. The Meiji Restoration—as history calls it—toppled the shogunate, and brought a seventeen-year-old boy emperor back from the secluded Imperial Palace in Kyoto to preside over what amounted to a political and cultural revolution. With this, Japan's extraordinary self-modernization began in earnest. Coming to power just as the Tokugawa regime was suffering the worst military defeat in its history, Yoshinobu strongly suspected that the rule of the Tokugawas—the third and longest lived of Japan's three warrior governments - was swiftly becoming an anachronism. During a year of frenetic activity, he overhauled the military systems, reorganized the civil administration, promoted industrial development, and expanded foreign intercourse, with the farsighted aim of creating a unified Japan. Alarmed by these reforms, pro-imperial interests moved against him, precipitating the Boshin Civil War and the final defeat of the shogunal armies. To the surprise of his enemies, Yoshinobu capitulated. It was this surrender of authority at a crucial point that made the transfer of sovereignty relatively peaceful. He then retired to Mito and lived quietly for the rest of his life, studying the new art of photography. Ennobled a prince in the new European-style nobility of the Meiji era, he died in 1913.
Author: Michael Laver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350126047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
Michael Laver examines how the giving of exotic gifts in early modern Japan facilitated Dutch trade by ascribing legitimacy to the shogunal government and by playing into the shogun's desire to create a worldview centered on a Japanese tributary state. The book reveals how formal and informal gift exchange also created a smooth working relationship between the Dutch and the Japanese bureaucracy, allowing the politically charged issue of foreign trade to proceed relatively uninterrupted for over two centuries. Based mainly on Dutch diaries and official Dutch East India Company records, as well as exhaustive secondary research conducted in Dutch, English, and Japanese, this new study fills an important gap in our knowledge of European-Japanese relations. It will also be of great interest to anyone studying the history of material culture and cross-cultural relations in a global context.
Author: James Clavell
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen--Nippon. Thrust into the closed society that is seventeenth-century Japan, a land where the line between life and death is razor-thin, Blackthorne must negotiate not only a foreign people, with unknown customs and language, but also his own definitions of morality, truth, and freedom. As internal political strife and a clash of cultures lead to seemingly inevitable conflict, Blackthorne's loyalty and strength of character are tested by both passion and loss, and he is torn between two worlds that will each be forever changed. Powerful and engrossing, capturing both the rich pageantry and stark realities of life in feudal Japan, Shōgun is a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a book. Heart-stopping, edge-of-your-seat action melds seamlessly with intricate historical detail and raw human emotion. Endlessly compelling, this sweeping saga captivated the world to become not only one of the best-selling novels of all time but also one of the highest-rated television miniseries, as well as inspiring a nationwide surge of interest in the culture of Japan. Shakespearean in both scope and depth, Shōgun is, as the New York Times put it, "...not only something you read--you live it." Provocative, absorbing, and endlessly fascinating, there is only one: Shōgun.
Author: Amy Stanley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501188542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography* *Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award* *Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* A “captivating” (The Washington Post) work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become Tokyo—and a portrait of a city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West. The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces—and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval—she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak. With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions. “A compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy” (The Wall Street Journal), Stranger in the Shogun’s City is “a vivid, polyphonic portrait of life in 19th-century Japan [that] evokes the Shogun era with panache and insight” (National Review of Books).
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780440557098
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
